When Congress created the Commission of Fine Arts more than a century ago, its members were intended to be “well-qualified judges of the fine arts” who would review and advise on major design projects in the nation’s capital, lawmakers wrote. The initial slate of commissioners included Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., architects and urban planners who designed much of Washington.
Now, the 116-year-old commission is set to include its newest, youngest member: Chamberlain Harris, a 26-year-old White House aide and a longtime executive assistant for President Donald Trump, who is slated to be sworn in at the panel’s next public meeting on Thursday.
Trump’s selection of Harris — who was known as the “receptionist of the United States” during the president’s first term and has no notable arts expertise — comes amid the president’s push to install allies on the arts commission and another panel, the National Capital Planning Commission. Both commissions are reviewing Trump’s planned White House ballroom and are expected to review his other Washington-area construction projects, such as his desired 250-foot triumphal arch.
Trump has said he hopes to complete the projects as quickly as possible, despite complaints about their size, design, and potential impact on Washington. A historical preservation group has sued the administration over the ballroom project, saying that Trump should have consulted with the federal review panels before tearing down the White House’s East Wing annex and beginning construction on his planned 90,000-square-foot, $400 million ballroom.
A federal judge weighing whether to halt the ballroom project in December had instructed the White House to go through the commissions before beginning construction.
Asked about Harris’s qualifications to serve on the fine arts commission, the White House on Tuesday touted her as a “loyal, trusted, and highly respected adviser” to the president.
“She understands the President’s vision and appreciation of the arts like very few others, and brings a unique perspective that will serve the Commission well,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in a statement. “She will be a tremendous asset to the Commission of Fine Arts and continue to honorably serve our country well.”
Harris, who holds the title of deputy director of Oval Office operations, received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2019 from the University at Albany, SUNY, with minors in communications and economics, according to an archived copy of her resumé on LinkedIn. She continued working for Trump as an executive assistant when he was out of office.
Harris was one of seven fine arts commissioners Trump appointed during a 19-day spree in January. The president had left the commission empty for months after firing all six members in October but raced to restock the panel ahead of the agency’s January meeting when the ballroom project was first added to the agenda.
Former fine arts commissioners said they could not recall a commissioner in the panel’s history with as little prior arts experience as Harris. Several former commissioners also noted that Trump has installed multiple appointees with minimal arts and urban planning expertise on both panels set to review his construction projects remaking Washington.
“It’s disastrous,” said Alex Krieger, an architect and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, who was chosen for the commission in 2012 by President Barack Obama and served a second term in the first Trump administration. “Some of these people just have no qualifications to evaluate matters of design, architecture, or urban planning.”
Past commissioners have included Billie Tsien, an architect currently working on Obama’s library, and Perry Guillot, a landscape architect who redesigned the White House Rose Garden during Trump’s first term.
Witold Rybczynski, an architect who was chosen for the Commission of Fine Arts by President George W. Bush and served a second term under Obama, wrote in an email that President Joe Biden also reshaped the panel by firing Trump appointees before their terms had concluded. He also noted that past presidents installed some political appointees and lesser-known experts to the panel, too.
“The degree of expertise … has varied,” Rybczynski wrote in an email. He is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor Emeritus of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.
The fine arts commission on Thursday is slated to review the latest ballroom designs and may vote to advance the project. The White House has said it hopes to win formal approval from both review panels by March and begin aboveground construction of the ballroom as early as April.
GENEVA, Switzerland — Delegations from Moscow and Kyiv met in Geneva on Tuesday for another round of U.S.-brokered peace talks, a week before the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
However, expectations for any breakthroughs in the scheduled two days of talks in Switzerland were low, with neither side apparently ready to budge from its positions on key territorial issues and future security guarantees, despite the United States setting a June deadline for a settlement.
The head of the Ukrainian delegation, Rustem Umerov, posted photos on social media of the three delegations at a horseshoe-shaped table, with the Ukrainian and Russian officials sitting across from each other. President Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law Jared Kushner sat at the head of the table in front of U.S., Russian, Ukrainian, and Swiss flags.
“The agenda includes security and humanitarian issues,” Umerov said, adding that Ukrainians will work “without excessive expectations.”
Tough talks expected
Discussions on the future of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory are expected to be particularly tough, according to a person familiar with the talks who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to talk to reporters.
Russa is still insisting that Ukraine cede control of its eastern Donbas region.
Also in Geneva will be American, Russian, and Ukrainian military chiefs, who will discuss how ceasefire monitoring might work after any peace deal, and what’s needed to implement it, the person said.
During previous talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, military leaders looked at how a demilitarized zone could be arranged and how everyone’s militaries could talk to one another, the person added.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov cautioned against expecting developments on the first day of talks as they were set to continue on Wednesday. Moscow has provided few details of previous talks.
Trump describes the talks as ‘big’
Ukraine’s short-handed army is locked in a war of attrition with Russia’s bigger forces along the roughly 750-mile front line. Ukrainian civilians are enduring Russian aerial barrages that repeatedly knock out power and destroy homes.
The future of the almost 20% of Ukrainian land that Russia occupies or still covets is a central question in the talks, as are Kyiv’s demands for postwar security guarantees with a U.S. backstop to deter Moscow from invading again.
Trump described the Geneva meeting as “big talks.”
“Ukraine better come to the table fast,” he told reporters late Monday as he flew back to Washington from his home in Florida.
It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump was referring to in his comment about Ukraine, which has committed to and taken part in negotiations in the hope of ending Russia’s devastating onslaught.
Complex talks as the war presses on
The Russian delegation is headed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adviser Vladimir Medinsky, who headed Moscow’s team of negotiators in the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul in March 2022 and has forcefully pushed Putin’s war goals. Medinsky has written several history books that claim to expose Western plots against Russia and berate Ukraine.
The commander of the U.S. military — and NATO forces — in Europe, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, and Secretary of the U.S. Army Dan Driscoll will attend the meeting in Geneva on behalf of the U.S. military and meet with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts, said Col. Martin O’Donnell, a spokesman for the U.S. commander.
Overnight, Russia used almost 400 long-range drones and 29 missiles of various types to strike 12 regions of Ukraine, injuring nine people, including children, according to the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky said tens of thousands of residents were left without heating and running water in the southern port city of Odesa. He said Moscow should be “held accountable” for the relentless attacks, which he said undermine the U.S. push for peace.
“The more this evil comes from Russia, the harder it will be for everyone to reach any agreements with them. Partners must understand this. First and foremost, this concerns the United States,” the Ukrainian leader said on social media late Monday.
“We agreed to all realistic proposals from the United States, starting with the proposal for an unconditional and long-term ceasefire,” Zelensky noted.
The talks in Geneva took place as U.S. officials also held indirect talks with Iran in the Swiss city.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, used long-range drones to strike an oil terminal in southern Russia and a major chemical plant deep inside the country, a Ukrainian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly told the AP.
Drones targeted the Tamanneftegaz oil terminal, one of the biggest ports of its type on the Black Sea, in Russia’s Krasnodar region for the second time this month, starting a fire, the official said.
Drones also hit the Metafrax Chemicals plan, which manufactures chemical components used in explosives and other military materials, in Russia’s Perm region, more than 1,000 miles from the Ukrainian border, according to the official.
Officially* one of Philadelphia’s region’s most impressive and enduring snow-cover streaks in the period of record ended peacefully at 7 a.m. Tuesday.
After 23 consecutive days of at least an inch on the ground at Philadelphia International Airport, the National Weather Service observer reported a mere “trace” at 7 a.m. Tuesday, meaning that whatever was left was hardly worth a ruler’s time.
“I can’t imagine too many people are sad about this,” said Mike Silva, meteorologist at the weather service office in Mount Holly.
The news might have evoked vast choruses of “good riddance” were it not for the fact that mass quantities of the snow and ice remain throughout the region, enough to contribute to the formation of dense fog late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, the weather service warned.
And regarding that asterisk, observations at PHL have been known to differ from actual conditions elsewhere, if not common sense.
In the meantime, heaps of aging, graying plowed snow are ubiquitous around the great Philadelphia city-state. As for melting “those big mountains, that’s going to take forever,” Silva said.
For 18 days after 9.3 inches of snow and sleet was measured at the airport, the official snowpack had been 3 inches or more, the longest such streak in 65 years.
The 23-day run of an inch or more, which began on Jan. 25 when the snow started, was the longest since 2003.
The endurance had to do with the melt-resistant icy sleet that fell atop several inches of snow and the Arctic freeze that followed. Temperatures remained significantly below normal for 17 consecutive days.
The great melt is picking up steam in the Philly region
However, the melting process is at long last accelerating. Bare ground is appearing around tree roots, and evidence of vegetative life has been poking through the snow cover.
Temperatures above freezing and the February sun have been making hay, but so has the return of invisible atmospheric moisture, even as precipitation remains far below normal.
When warm, moist air comes in contact with snow, it condenses and yields latent heat that accelerates melting. That is evident in the swelling ranks of rivulets on driveways and in the streets.
The combination of the moisture, the cold snow and ice pack, and generally calm winds will result in fog that could reduce visibilities to a quarter mile at times. The weather service issued a dense fog advisory, in effect from 10 p.m. Tuesday until 10 a.m. Wednesday.
Melting conditions should be excellent the rest of the workweek, with highs in the 40s and light rain possible Wednesday night, and likely on Friday.
Temperatures are due to remain above freezing into the weekend, but “then we’ll have to see what happens Sunday,” Silva said.
Another storm is due to develop in the Southeast, and expect another week of computer-model vacillation on whether it will produce rain, snow, or partly cloudy skies.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has issued new subpoenas in a Florida-based investigation into perceived adversaries of President Donald Trump and the U.S. government response to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
An initial wave of subpoenas in November asked recipients for documents related to the preparation of a U.S. intelligence community assessment that detailed a sweeping, multiprong effort by Moscow to help Trump defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Though the first subpoenas requested documents from the months surrounding the January 2017 publication of the Obama administration intelligence assessment, the latest subpoenas seek any records from the years since then, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press to discuss a nonpublic demand from investigators.
The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday.
The subpoenas reflect continued investigative activity in one of several criminal inquiries the Justice Department has undertaken into Trump’s political opponents. An array of former intelligence and law enforcement officials have received subpoenas in the investigation. Lawyers for former CIA Director John Brennan, who helped oversee the drafting of the assessment and who has been called “crooked as hell” by Trump, have said they have been informed he is a target but have not been told of any “legally justifiable basis for undertaking this investigation.”
The intelligence community assessment, published in the final days of the Obama administration, found that Russia had developed a “clear preference” for Trump in the 2016 election and that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an influence campaign with goals of undermining confidence in American democracy and harming Clinton’s chance for victory.
That conclusion, and a related investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign colluded with Russia to sway the outcome of the election, have long been among the Republican president’s chief grievances and he has vowed retribution against the government officials involved in the inquiries. Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted by the Trump administration Justice Department last year on false statement and obstruction charges, but the case was later dismissed.
Multiple government reports, including bipartisan congressional reviews and a criminal investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller, have found that Russia interfered in Trump’s favor through a hack-and-leak operation of Democratic emails as well as a covert social media campaign aimed at sowing discord and swaying American public opinion. Mueller’s report found that the Trump campaign actively welcomed the Russian help, but it did not establish that Russian operatives and Trump or his associates conspired to tip the election in his favor.
The Trump administration has freshly scrutinized the intelligence community assessment in part because a classified version of it incorporated in its annex a summary of the “Steele dossier,” a compilation of Democratic-funded opposition research that was assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele and was later turned over to the FBI. That research into Trump’s potential links to Russia included uncorroborated rumors and salacious gossip, and Trump has long held up its weaknesses in an effort to discredit the entire Russia investigation.
A declassified CIA tradecraft review ordered by current Director John Ratcliffe and released last July faults Brennan’s oversight of the assessment.
The review does not challenge the conclusion of Russian election interference but chides Brennan for the fact that the classified version referenced the Steele dossier.
Brennan testified to Congress, and also wrote in his memoir, that he was opposed to citing the dossier in the intelligence assessment since neither its substance nor sources had been validated, and he has said the dossier did not inform the judgments of the assessment. He maintains the FBI pushed for its inclusion.
The new CIA review seeks to cast Brennan’s views in a different light, asserting that he “showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness” and brushed aside concerns over the dossier because he believed it conformed “with existing theories.” It quotes him, without context, as having stated in writing that “my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
In a letter last December addressed to the chief judge of the Southern District of Florida, where the investigation is based, Brennan’s lawyers challenged the underpinnings of the investigation, questioning what basis prosecutors had for opening the inquiry in Florida and saying they had received no clarity from prosecutors about what potential crimes were even being investigated.
“While it is mystifying how the prosecutors could possibly believe there is any legally justifiable basis for undertaking this investigation, they have done nothing to explain that mystery,” the lawyers said.
CHICAGO — The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the revered leader’s assassination, died Tuesday. He was 84.
As a young organizer in Chicago, Rev. Jackson was called to meet with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly before King was killed, and he publicly positioned himself thereafter as King’s successor.
Santita Jackson confirmed that her father, who had a rare neurological disorder, died at home in Chicago, surrounded by family.
Rev. Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues, including voting rights, job opportunities, education, and healthcare. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society.
And when he declared, “I am Somebody,” in a poem he often repeated, he sought to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I am Somebody; I may be young; but I am Somebody; I may be on welfare, but I am Somebody,” Rev. Jackson intoned.
It was a message he took literally and personally, having risen from obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s best-known civil rights activist since King.
“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement posted online. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”
Democratic presidential primary candidate Jesse Jackson speaks to a group of his supporters at a rally held at a Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio, on April 14, 1984.
Fellow civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton said his mentor “was not simply a civil rights leader; he was a movement unto himself.”
“He taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and that justice is not seasonal, it is daily work,” Sharpton wrote in a statement, adding that Rev. Jackson taught “trying is as important as triumph. That you do not wait for the dream to come true; you work to make it real.”
“Even if we win,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before the officer whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”
Rev. Jackson’s voice, infused with the stirring cadences and powerful insistence of the Black church, demanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he used rhyming and slogans such as “Hope not dope” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” to deliver his messages.
Rev. Jackson had his share of critics, both within and outside of the Black community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek the spotlight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Rev. Jackson told the Associated Press in 2011 that he felt blessed to be able to continue the service of other leaders before him and to lay a foundation for those to come.
“A part of our life’s work was to tear down walls and build bridges, and in a half century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Rev. Jackson said. “Sometimes when you tear down walls, you’re scarred by falling debris, but your mission is to open up holes so others behind you can run through.”
Barack Obama, then a senator. from Illinois, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson are seen at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Awards Breakfast in Chicago on Jan. 15, 2007.
In his final months, as he received 24-hour care, he lost his ability to speak, communicating with family and visitors by holding their hands and squeezing.
“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages now,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October.
A student athlete drawn to the Civil Rights Movement
Jesse Louis Jackson was born Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, S.C., the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.
Rev. Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School in Greenville, and he accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois. But after reportedly being told that Black people couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honor student in sociology and economics, and student body president.
Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after students there launched sit-ins at a whites-only lunch counter, Rev. Jackson immersed himself in the blossoming Civil Rights Movement.
By 1965, he joined the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers.
U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), the Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson and NAACP President Derrick Johnson walk across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Ala., on March 9, 2025, during the 60th anniversary of the march to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote.
Rev. Jackson called his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work.”
Rev. Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was slain. Rev. Jackson’s account of the assassination was that King died in his arms.
Sharpton said he “always wondered how much trauma that must have been” for Rev. Jackson to witness King’s death. “He never would talk about it too much, but it drove him,” Sharpton said Tuesday. “He said, ‘We’ve got to keep Dr. King’s legacy alive.’”
With his flair for the dramatic, Rev. Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was soaked with King’s blood for two days, including at a King memorial service held by the Chicago City Council, where he said: “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King’s head.”
However, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, questioned whether Rev. Jackson could have gotten King’s blood on his clothing. There are no images of Rev. Jackson in pictures taken shortly after the assassination.
In 1971, Rev. Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form Operation PUSH, originally named People United to Save Humanity. The organization based on Chicago’s South Side declared a sweeping mission, from diversifying workforces to registering voters in communities of color nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Rev. Jackson pressured top corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to hiring more diverse employees.
The constant campaigns often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, the college sweetheart he married in 1963, taking the lead in raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 but is seeking reelection in the 2026 midterms.
The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned his master’s of divinity degree in 2000, also acknowledged fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/PUSH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it means to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and financially.
On Tuesday, Harold Hall joined other mourners who stopped by the family home to pay their respects.
Hall, who once lived in the same Chicago neighborhood as Rev. Jackson, left a bouquet of flowers outside Rev. Jackson’s door and recalled that he helped local street organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Rev. Jackson “would come out and shoot ball and try to change the minds of many of our young folk,” urging them to stay out of trouble, Hall told reporters. “And in many instances, it happened. It worked.”
Presidential aspirations fall short but help ‘keep hope alive’
Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me,” Rev. Jackson ran twice and did better than any Black politician had before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.
His successes left supporters chanting another Rev. Jackson slogan, “Keep hope alive.”
“I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of color,” he told the AP. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”
U.S. Rep. John Lewis said during a 1988 C-SPAN interview that Rev. Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors that some minority person will be able to walk through and become president.”
Obama acknowledged Rev. Jackson’s efforts, saying he led some of the most significant movements for change in human history.
Michelle Obama “got her first glimpse of political organizing at the Jacksons’ kitchen table when she was a teenager,” Obama wrote on X. “And in his two historic runs for president, he laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office in the world.”
Rev. Jackson “was relentless in his belief that we are all children of God, deserving of dignity and respect,” the post read.
Rev. Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify Black people in the United States as African Americans.
“To be called African Americans has cultural integrity — it puts us in our proper historical context,” Rev. Jackson said at the time. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”
Rev. Jackson’s words sometimes got him in trouble.
In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to a reporter in which he called New York City “Hymietown,” a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to Black people” in comments captured by a microphone he didn’t know was on during a break in a television taping.
Still, when Rev. Jackson joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Obama that election night, he had tears streaming down his face.
“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or [slain civil rights leader] Medgar Evers … could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
Exerting influence on events at home and abroad
Rev. Jackson also had influence abroad, meeting world leaders and scoring diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, as well as the 1990 release of more than 700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1999, he won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Rev. Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
“Citizens have the right to do something or do nothing,” Rev. Jackson said, before heading to Syria. “We choose to do something.”
In 2021, Rev. Jackson joined the parents of Ahmaud Arbery inside the Georgia courtroom where three white men were convicted of killing the young Black jogger. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, calling for federal charges against former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in the 2014 killing of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.
Rev. Jackson, who stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023, disclosed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’s, but he continued to make public appearances even as the disease made it more difficult for listeners to understand him. Last year, doctors confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. He was admitted to a hospital in November for nearly two weeks.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived being hospitalized with COVID-19. Rev. Jackson was vaccinated early, urging Black people in particular to get protected, given their higher risks for bad outcomes.
“It’s America’s unfinished business — we’re free, but not equal,” Rev. Jackson told the AP. “There’s a reality check that has been brought by the coronavirus, that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.”
New Jersey prosecutors are dropping racketeering charges against Democratic power broker George E. Norcross III, ending a high-profile case that law enforcement officials had framed as a reckoning on the state’s culture of corruption.
Acting Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill, will not appeal a January appellate court ruling that upheld a judge’s decision to dismiss charges against Norcross and five codefendants, the attorney general’s office said Tuesday.
Davenport could have asked the state Supreme Court to review the Appellate Division’s decision, but prosecutors concluded that their resources “would be best spent on other matters,” Sharon Lauchaire, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, said in a statement.
A three-judge panel said in a Jan. 30 decision that several of the racketeering conspiracy and extortion charges were time-barred under the statute of limitations. Other counts failed to state a crime, were untimely, or both, the panel said.
Norcross, 69, is a former longtime member of the Democratic National Committee, founder of insurance brokerage Conner Strong & Buckelew, and chair of Cooper University Health Care. He was accused of using threats of economic and reputational harm — and his purported control of Camden’s government — to obtain valuable property on Camden’s waterfront from a developer and a nonprofit.
His spokesperson on Tuesday portrayed the case against Norcross — announced in June 2024 by then-Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin — as a politicized abuse of the law similar to the Trump Justice Department’s targeting of perceived enemies.
“We always knew that Matt Platkin brought this case for reasons other than its legal merits — and now multiple judges and Platkin’s successor as AG agree the allegations simply weren’t true,” Norcross spokesperson Dan Fee said in a statement.
“The question now is whether Platkin’s supporters who cheered him on will take a serious look at what he did and whether other authorities will do the same,” he said. “We will certainly be making the case that he and anyone else who used lawfare against George should be held to account, no differently than Pam Bondi and her DOJ should.”
Platkin, who was appointed to the post by Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, has denied pursuing the case for political reasons. He noted on Tuesday that the case “was presented to a grand jury by career prosecutors over several months.”
“Out of respect for the men and women who do brave work holding corruption to account, I won’t comment further — other than to say I remain proud to have supported their efforts at a time when trust in government is at an all-time low and I will never apologize for believing that everyone should be held to the same standards, no matter how powerful they may be,” Platkin said in a statement.
Notwithstanding the decision to drop charges, Lauchaire said the attorney general’s office “remains committed to prioritizing public corruption prosecutions in this time of deepening mistrust in government.”
“Wrongdoing by public officials undermines faith in our institutions, and the public rightfully demands and deserves that officials perform their duties with integrity and in accordance with the law,” she said. “We will never shy away from holding public officials accountable when they betray the public’s trust and behave unlawfully.”
The prosecution faced an earlier setback last February, when a Superior Court judge found that the charges were not timely and said that even if the allegations in the indictment were proven true, they amounted to hard bargaining in real estate deals and did not cross the line into unlawful threats.
Prosecutors appealed that ruling, arguing that the judge should review evidence presented to the grand jury before deciding whether the indictment was valid.
The appeals court affirmed the trial judge’s order, though the panel focused on the statute of limitations violations and largely sidestepped the question of whether the threats underpinning the indictment met the legal requirements for alleging conspiracy to commit extortion.
In addition to Norcross, prosecutors are dropping charges against his brother Philip Norcross, CEO of the law firm Parker McCay; attorney William Tambussi; former Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd; Sidney R. Brown, CEO of logistics firm NFI; and John J. O’Donnell, an executive at residential developer the Michaels Organization.
“We are pleased and gratified that this misguided, baseless prosecution has been finally laid to rest,” said Kevin H. Marino, a lawyer for Philip Norcross.
Henry Klingeman, an attorney for Redd, said his client “is relieved that this unjust and unnecessary ordeal is over.” The former mayor has “continued her unswerving commitment to bettering Camden,” Klingeman said.
Brown said he was “innocent of these baseless charges” and added that Tuesday’s decision showed “justice was carried out based on the facts.”
“Since its inception, this case was unfounded and attacked those of us who believed in the future of a thriving Camden,” the NFI CEO said in a statement.
Tambussi’s lawyers, Jeff Chiesa and Lee Vartan, said their client “engaged in the routine practice of law.” They said Platkin’s attempted prosecution “did damage to the profession” and “was rightly rejected by both courts.”
The University of Pennsylvania soon may be off-limits to Army officers and other military service members who are seeking tuition aid to further their educations.
The Ivy League university in West Philadelphia is among 34 schools the Army says are at risk of being banned from military funding for service members to pay for their graduate programs and other education, according to a CNN report. The messaging has caused confusion among military officers seeking advanced degrees in law, medicine, and nuclear engineering, the report states.
The G.I. Bill and similar programs to pay for college have long been a major draw for people who join the military. But last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the DOD “will discontinue graduate-level professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs” at Harvard.
“Too many faculty members openly loathe our military,” said Hegseth, who obtained a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard in 2013. “They cast our armed forces in a negative light and squelch anyone who challenges their leftist political leanings, all while charging enormous tuition.”
File this under: LONG OVERDUE
The @DeptWar is formally ending ALL Professional Military Education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard University.
Hegseth, a former Army National Guard officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the department, which he calls the Department of War, is evaluating its relationships with other schools as well.
“[We] will evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty service members at all Ivy League universities and other civilian universities,” he said. “The goal is to determine whether or not they actually deliver cost-effective strategic education for future senior leaders when compared to, say, public universities and our military graduate programs.”
CNN obtained a “preliminary list of at-risk schools compiled by the Army,” which includes the University of Pennsylvania, as well as nearby Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Officials at Princeton and Penn did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.
“We are aware of reports indicating that Carnegie Mellon is among several universities whose eligibility to support graduate training for military officers may be under review. At this time, we have received no formal notification confirming that any such review is underway,” a spokesperson for Carnegie Mellon said in a statement. “As always, CMU stands ready to engage constructively with the Department on ways to strengthen and advance military education.”
Numerous schools on the list are the alma maters of Trump administration officials. In addition to attending Harvard, Hegseth obtained a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton. President Donald Trump holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Vice President JD Vance holds a law degree from Yale University.
Here is the preliminary list of “at-risk” schools:
American University
Boston College
Boston University
Brown University
Carnegie Mellon
Case Western University
Columbia University
College of William and Mary
Cornell University
Duke
Emory
Florida Institute of Technology
Fordham
Georgetown
George Washington University
Harvard
Hawaii Pacific University
Johns Hopkins University
London School of Economics and Political Science
MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]
Northeastern University
Northwestern University
New York University
Pepperdine
Princeton
Stanford
Tufts
University of Miami
University of Pennsylvania
University of Southern California
Vanderbilt
Wake Forest
Washington University in St Louis
Yale
Update: This article has been updated to include comment from Carnegie Mellon University.
Penn’s graduate student workers have reached a tentative agreement on a first union contract, averting a strike.
The two-year tentative agreement includes increases to wages among other benefits.
“I am so proud of what we were able to accomplish with this contract,” Clara Abbott, a Ph.D. candidate in literary studies and member of the bargaining committee said in a statement. “We won a historic contract that enshrines gains for grad workers.”
Research and teaching assistants at the university voted to unionize in 2024. The union, which represents about 3,400 graduate student workers, is known as Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP) and is part of the United Auto Workers (UAW). The union has been negotiating with the university since October 2024 for a first contract.
In November, the union’s bargaining members voted to authorize a strike, if called for by the union. In January, they set a strike deadline, announcing that they would walk off the job on Feb. 17 if they had not reached a deal.
A deal was announced in the early morning hours Tuesday.
While tentative agreements had been reached on a number of issues, some remained without consensus ahead of the final bargaining session on Monday before the strike deadline. Those sticking points included wages, healthcare, and discounts on SEPTA passes.
“We are pleased to announce that a tentative agreement has been reached between Penn and GETUP-UAW,” a university spokesperson said in a statement. “Penn has a long-standing commitment to its graduate students and value their contributions to Penn’s important missions. We are grateful to all the members of the Penn community who helped us achieve this tentative agreement.”
A date to vote on the ratification of the tentative agreement has not yet been announced.
The deal comes as earlier this month Pennsylvania state senators and representatives and Philadelphia City Council members addressed letters to the university’s president and provost, urging them to come to an agreement with the student workers and avoid a strike.
“A strike at the University of Pennsylvania would seriously disrupt life for the tens of thousands of Philadelphians who are students, employees, and patients at Penn,” the letter signed by City Council members reads. “As such, we strongly urge the Penn administration to avert a strike by coming to a fair agreement that meets the needs of graduate student employees prior to February 17th.”
Monday’s bargaining session brought tentative agreements on sticking points that included wages and healthcare coverage.
If ratified, the tentative deal would provide graduate student workers with an annual minimum wage of $49,000, which the union has said is a 22% increase over the previous standard. For those paid on an hourly basis, the minimum hourly rate would be $25. Those rates would go into effect in April and a 3% increase would be provided in July 2027.
The deal would also create a fund with $200,000 annually from which graduate student workers could seek reimbursements to cover up to 50% of their dependent’s health insurance premiums.
Ahead of the Monday bargaining session, other tentative agreements had come together around leave. The university agreed to give six weeks of paid medical leave, as well as eight weeks of paid parental leave.
The university and the union had also recently reached a tentative agreement that would create an annual $50,000 fund to help international graduate student workers with expenses associated with reinstating or extending visas.
What would have happened in the event of a strike?
Graduate student workers in the bargaining group teach and conduct research at the university.
Classes, research, and other academic activities would have continued during a strike, according to the university spokesperson. Penn published guidance on how to continue this work in the event of a work stoppage or other disruption.
Striking graduate student workers would not have been paid throughout a work stoppage, but would have continued to be covered by their health insurance for the time being, according to a university statement.
If others employed at the university who are not in the bargaining group chose to join the work stoppage, they would not have been paid and could have faced consequences “up to and including separation from that position, depending on the circumstances of the refusal to work,” according to a university statement.
Ahead of the tentative agreement on Monday, hundreds signed a pledge indicating that they are employed at Penn and would not do the work of those on strike or assign it to others in the event of a work stoppage.
Time may be a flat circle, but that doesn’t stop us from wondering why. A reader asked through Curious Philly, The Inquirer’s forum for answering questions, why there are so many chicken bones on the sidewalks and streets of Philadelphia.
Two architects appear to bebehind Philadelphia’s chicken-bone temple.
First are animals, who forage through trash looking for the final scraps left on discarded bones. Whether they discover drumsticks by ripping through trash bags on the street or from dumpster diving, these animals likely drop the bones wherever they finish with them.
Theculprits most likely to blame are rats, followed by raccoons and opossums, said Rich Foreman, the owner of Dynamite Pest Control in West Philly.
While it’s unclear if rats have a particular taste for fried chicken, the animals are among the least-picky eaters around and will take advantage of any food source, from human scraps to cannibalism. And Philadelphia is seemingly a good place to be a rat, being declared the eighth-rattiest city in the United States in 2025 by the pest-control company Orkin, measured by tracking its new residential rodent treatments.
Adrian Jordan, Vector Control Crew Chief, works keeping the rat population under control, in Philadelphia, Friday, March 7, 2025.
Foreman sees the chicken-bone problem all over the city, as with some restaurants in Port Richmond that called Dynamite when they saw their trash all over the street. He is confident animals were behind the mess, and said he has “never seen” humans do anything of the sort.
Foreman said the city’s twice-weekly trash pickup initiative has not helped, since it means an additional day of easily accessible trash on the street for animals.
He said the best way for people to prevent critters from going into their garbage for bones is to get large, durable trash cans.
“And make sure you put the lid on it,” he said.
Residents with trash arriving at garbage dump site at Caldera Road and Red Lion Road in northeast Philadelphia. AFSCME District Council 33 workers enter their second week on strike, Tuesday, July 8, 2025.
Scavenging animals was the conclusion that the Search Engine podcast reached in a 2024 episode investigating the cause of the chicken bones littering the streets of New York City. Other cities have reported the same problem, including Chicago, Miami, and Washington.
And yet, anecdotal evidence from residents demonstrates that human activity clearly contributes to the problem.
Jessica Griffith has become the David Attenborough of abandoned chicken bones, documenting and appreciating the beauty of what she encounters in the wild. More than 10 years ago, when she lived in South Philly, Griffith, 46, would notice the chicken bones frequently on walks with her dog. She started photographing them and posting the pictures to Facebook, finding the bones everywhere, including a pile on a SEPTA train.
“It was just bizarre to me. Just a phenomenon,” she said.
Jessica Griffith snapped this picture of some discarded chicken bones on the Broad Street Line in 2013.
Her documentation gathered a following, and people started to send their own submissions. Griffith received pictures from all over the globe — people in Seattle, Las Vegas, South Korea, Sweden, and the Dominican Republic all had their own pictures of discarded chicken bones to share.
When Brian Love, 53, walks his miniature pinscher, Ziggy, through the Gayborhood, he often sees other people smiling at his dog. But then he realizes it’s because Ziggy is carrying a chicken bone in his mouth.
Love has complained to his friends about constantly needing to tussle with Ziggy over what the dog sees as a treasure. He has watched people toss chicken bones on the ground, and recently came across a pile of four bones on a mound of snow. Love wishes his neighbors would just use trash bins.
“It’s your food that you’ve literally just had in your mouth. Throw it in the trash,” he said.
Stephanie Harmelin, 43, has the same problem with her dog in West Philly, and she said she accepts the bony sidewalks as part of living in a city. She has seen aggressive squirrels rifling through trash, but also has come across bones at street corners and under park benches that appear to have been dropped by humans.
She said part of the problem is educational. Once, Harmelin pulled her dog away from a bone on the street, and two fellow walkers asked her why.
Harmelin explained how chicken bones are unsafe for most dogs to consume. Cooked bones splinter when a dog chews on them, and the sharp fragments may cause life-threatening damage as they pass through the dog’s digestive track.
One woman was shocked, and said she had not realized chicken bones were potentially dangerous to dogs when she had tossed them to the ground before.
Theo Caraway of Philadelphia walking his dog Cooper, 6 months, Shitzu/Poodle wearing his Eagles jersey along Kensington at Ontario Street on Philadelphia, Friday, September 5, 2025.
Harmelin has had similar conversations with others who were not aware of the hazards bones create. Now, she is less likely to be frustrated at whomever has dropped the chicken bone on her street corner.
“We’re trying to assume what other people know and intend, but we can’t,” she said.
Even if more people get the message, though, it appears you will still be as likely to find a chicken bone on the street as a fallen leaf.
Although they’re a gross nuisance of a sidewalk adornment, Griffith doesn’t really mind them. She said they are more of a curiosity that make Philly what it is, in a small way.
One night in early December, the phones of Radnor High School students started buzzing. Some freshmen girls were getting disturbing messages: A male classmate, they were told, had made pornographic videos of them.
When one of the girls walked into school the next morning, “she said everyone was staring at her,” said her mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter’s identity. “All the kids knew. It spread like wildfire.”
So-called AI deepfakes — pictures of a real person manipulated with artificial intelligence,sometimes with “nudify” features that can convert clothed photos into naked ones — have become the talk of school hallways and Snapchat conversations in some area schools.
As Pennsylvania lawmakers have pushed new restrictions cracking down on deepfakes — defining explicit images as child sexual abuse material, and advancing another measure that would require schools to immediately alert law enforcement about AI incidents — schools say they have no role in criminal investigations, and are limited in their ability to police students off campus.
But some parents say schools should be taking a more proactive stance to prepare for AI abuse — and are failing to protect victims when it happens, further harming students who have been violated by their peers.
In the Council Rock School District, where AI-generated deepfakes were reported last March, parents of targeted girls said administrators waited five days to contact the police about the allegations and never notified the community, even after two boys were charged with crimes.
“They denied everything and kind of shoved it under the rug and failed to acknowledge it,” said a mother in Council Rock, who also requested anonymity to protect her daughter’s identity. “Everybody thought it was a rumor,” rather than real damage done to girls, the mother said.
Council Rock spokesperson Andrea Mangoldsaid that the district “recognizes and understands the deep frustration and concern expressed by parents,” and that a police investigation “began promptly upon the district’s notification.”
Mangold said that current laws were “insufficient to fully prevent or deter these incidents,” and that the district was “limited in what we know and what we can legally share publicly” due to student privacy laws.
In Radnor, parents also said the district minimized the December incident. A district message last month said a student had created images of classmates that “move and dance,” and reported that police had not found evidence of “anything inappropriate” — even though police later saidthey had charged a student with harassment after an investigation into alleged sexualized images of multiple girls.
A Radnor spokesperson said the alleged images were never discovered and the district’s message was cowritten by Radnor police, who declined to comment.
The district “approaches all student-related matters with care and sensitivity for those involved,” said the spokesperson, Theji Brennan. She said the district was limited in what it could share about minors.
In both Radnor and Council Rock, parents said their daughters were offered little support — and were told that if they were uncomfortable, they could go to quiet rooms or leave classes early to avoid crossing paths with boys involved in the incidents.
“She just felt like no one believed her,” the Radnor mother said of her daughter.
How an investigation unfolded in Radnor
In Radnor, five freshman girls first heard they were victims of deepfakes on Dec. 2, according to parents of two of the victims who requested anonymity to protect their daughters’ identities. They said boys told their daughters that a male classmate had made videosdepicting them sexually.
In a Snapchat conversation that night, one boy said, “‘Nobody tell their parents,’” a mother of one of the victims recalled. Reading her daughter’s texts, “it quickly went from high school drama to ‘Wow, this is serious.’”
The girls and their parents never saw the videos. In an email to school officials the next morning, parents asked for an investigation, discipline for the students involved, and efforts to stop any sharing of videos. They also asked for support for their daughters.
Schooladministrators began interviewing students. The mother of one of the victims said her daughter was interviewed alone by the male assistant principal — an uncomfortable dynamic, given the subject matter, she said.
One mother said the principal told her daughter that it was the boys’ word against hers, and that he was “so glad nothing was shared” on social media — even though no one knew at that point where videos had been shared, the mother said.
The principal said the school had no authority over kids’ phones, so the girl and her family would need to call the police if they wanted phones searched, the mother said.
Brennan, the Radnor spokesperson, said that administrators contacted Radnor police and child welfare authorities the same day they spoke with families. “The district’s and the police department’s investigations have found no evidence that the images remain or were shared, posted, or otherwise circulated,” she said.
The male classmate acknowledged making videos of the girls dancing in thong bikinis, the parents said police told them. But the app he used was deleted from his phone, and the videos were not on it, the police told them.
The parents didn’t believe the admission.
“I don’t think a 14-year-boy would report a TikTok video of girls in bikinis,” said one of the mothers, who said her daughter was told she was naked and touching herself in videos.
The police told parents they did not subpoena the app or any social media companies, making it impossible to know what was created.
Radnor Police Chief Chris Flanagan declined to comment, as did the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office.
In a message sent to the district community Jan. 16 announcing the end of the police investigation, officials said a student, outside of school hours, had taken “publicly available” photos of other students and “used an app that animates images, making them appear to move and dance.”
“No evidence shared with law enforcement depicted anything inappropriate or any other related crime,” the message said.
A week later, the police released a statement saying a juvenile was charged with harassment after an investigation into “the possible use of AI to generate non-consensual sexualized imagery of numerous juveniles.”
Asked why the district’s statement had omitted the criminal charge or mention of sexualized imagery, Brennan said the statement was also signed by Flanagan, who declined to comment on the discrepancy.
Brennan said the district had provided ongoing support to students, including access to a counselor and social worker.
Parents said the district had erred in failing to initiate a Title IX sexual harassment investigation, instead telling parents they needed to file their own complaints.
“They kept saying, ‘This is off campus,’” the mother said. But “my daughter could not walk around without crying and feeling ashamed.”
Parents say girls were ‘not supported’ in Council Rock
In Council Rock, a girl came home from Newtown Middle School on March 17 and told her mother a classmate had created naked images of her.
“I’m like, ‘Excuse me? Nobody contacted me,’” said the mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter’s identity. She called the school’s principal, who she said told her: “‘Oh, my God, I meant to reach out to you. I have a list of parents, I just have not gotten to it’ — you know, really downplaying it.”
The mother and other victims’parents later learned that administrators were alerted to the images on March 14, when boys reported them to the principal. But instead of calling the police, the principal met with the accused boy and his father, according to parents. Police told parents they were contacted by the school five days later. The Newtown police did not respond to a request for comment.
Mangold, the Council Rock spokesperson, declined to comment on the specific timing of the school’s contact with police.
Police ultimately obtained images after issuing a subpoena to Snapchat; in total, there were 11 victims, the parents said.
Through the Snapchat data, police learned that a second boy was involved, the parents said, which made them question what was created and how far it spread.
Parents said they believe there are more pictures and videos than police saw, based on what their daughters were told — and because the delayed reporting to police could have given boys an opportunity to delete evidence.
“That’s kind of what the fear of our daughters is — like, what was actually out there?” said one mother, who also requested anonymity to protect her child’s identity.
Manuel Gamiz, a spokesperson for the Bucks County district attorney, said Newtown Township police had charged two juveniles with unlawful dissemination of sexually explicit material by a minor. Gamiz said the office could not provide further information because the case involved juveniles.
Juvenile cases are not public, but victims’ parents said both boys were adjudicated delinquent. While the boys had been attending Council Rock North High School with their daughters, the district agreed to transfer both after their cases were resolved, according to a lawyer representing four of the parents, Matthew Faranda-Diedrich.
“How can you let this person be roaming the halls?” said Faranda-Diedrich, who said it took formal demand letters in order for the district to transfer the boys.
He accused the district of mishandling the incident and “protecting the institution” rather than the victimized girls.
“They’re putting themselves above these students,” Faranda-Diedrich said.
Parents said school leaders warned their daughters against spreading rumors, and never sent a districtwide message about the incident.
“These girls were victims,” one of the mothers said, “and they were not supported.”
She and the other mothers who spoke to The Inquirer said the incident has deeply affected their daughters, from anxiety around what images may have been created — and how many people saw them — to a loss of trust in school leaders.
Some of the girls are considering switching schools, one mother said.
State law changes and a debate around education about deepfakes
Those changes came in 2024 and 2025, after a scandal over deepfakes of nearly 50 girls at a Lancaster private school.
Another bill that passed the state Senate unanimously in November would require school staff and other mandated reporters to report AI-generated explicit images of minors as child abuse — closing what prosecutors had cited as a loophole when they declined to bring charges against Lancaster Country Day School for failing to report AI images to the police. That legislation is now pending in the House.
Schools can also do more, said Faranda-Diedrich, who also represented parents of victims in the Lancaster Country Day School incident. He has pressed schools to conduct mandated reporter training for staff. “By and large they refuse,” he said.
In Radnor, parents urged the school board at last week’s committee meeting to make changes.
Parent Luciana Librandi walks back to her seat after speaking during a Radnor school board committee meeting last week.
Luciana Librandi, a parent of a freshman who said she had been “directly impacted by the misuse of generative AI,” called for timelines for contacting police following an AI incident, safeguards during student questioning, and annual education for students and parents on AI.
Others called for the district to communicate the criminal charge to families, to enforce existing policies against harassment, and to independently review its response to the recent incident.
Radnor officials said they are planning educational programming on the dangers of making AI images without a person’s consent.
There is somedebate on whether to teach children about “nudify” apps and their dangers, said Riana Pfefferkorn, policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, who has researched the prevalence of AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Alerting kids to the apps’ existence could cause them “to make a beeline for it,” Pfefferkorn said.
While “this isn’t something that is epidemic levels in schools just yet,” Pfefferkorn said, “is this a secret we can keep from children?”
One of the victims’ parents in Radnor said education on the topic is overdue.
“It’s clearly in school,” the mother said. “The fact there’s no video being shown on the big screen in your cafeteria — we don’t live in that world anymore.”
